Deeplinks Blog posts about Coders' Rights Project

Vanity Fair suggests that Sarah Palin's distinctive voice on Facebook and Twitter is actually someone else's. According to the article, she appears to have given a ghostwriter access to her social networking accounts to speak on her behalf:

Hari Prasad, the Indian security researcher arrested for allegedly stealing an electronic voting machine, has been released on bail.

Earlier this year, an anonymous source gave the machine to Prasad and a team of researchers, who discovered critical security flaws. Under questioning by authorities last weekend, Prasad refused to divulge the identity of the source who gave them the machine. He was then arrested and reportedly charged with theft and trespass on the theory that he stole the machine himself.

An Indian computer scientist was arrested this weekend when he refused to disclose an anonymous source who provided an electronic voting machine to a team of security researchers.

Hari Prasad is the managing director of Netindia Ltd., an Indian research and development firm. He and other researchers have long questioned the security of India's paperless electronic voting machines. Despite repeated reports of election irregularities and concerns about fraud, the Election Commission of India insists that the machines are tamper-proof.

In the latest battle to protect users from punishment for violating website terms of use, EFF filed a brief today in U.S. v. Lowson, again arguing that public websites can not decide who is and is not a criminal.

In this federal prosecution in New Jersey, the government charged the operators of Wiseguys Tickets, Inc. with violating Ticketmaster's terms of service, and therefore the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, by using bots to purchase event tickets to resell them.

Can public websites decide who is and is not a criminal through their terms of service? A brief EFF filed yesterday argues no.

The amicus brief is a follow-up to one we filed last month in Facebook v. Power Ventures. Facebook claims that Power breaks California criminal law by offering users a tool that aggregates their own information across several social networking sites. For some, it may be a useful way to access various social network information through one interface. The tool also makes it easier for users to export their data out of Facebook. In its suit against Power Ventures, Facebook claims that the tool violates criminal law because Facebook's terms of service ban users from accessing their information through "automated means."